Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better (opens in new tab)

Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg. We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!). If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/

While PG has probably gotten a lot of use and growth with the growth/maintreaming of the Internet since the 1990s, (TIL) it started back in 1971:

> Michael S. Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.[5] Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. […] This computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. Hart believed one day the general public would be able to access computers and decided to make works of literature available in electronic form for free. […]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg

The best thing I ever did for my father was to buy him a kindle and an access point and show him how to use Project Gutenberg to get books. He loved the old writings (he being a GED holder who was in the Navy during Korea yet had read the entire Harvard Classics). He had a special rolled up towel he used to prop it on his lap in his favorite chair and he read and read and read. When he passed he was reading "Legends of the Jews" from 1931.

I had some small e-correspondence with Michael S. Hart back in the 90's as well, and made a few modest contributions to the project, which made my English major undergraduate heart swell with pride and joy.

I guess this is only to say that PG is special to me for these reasons, and I am glad to see it still thriving. <3

I'm surprised no eBook Reader vendor has a Project Gutenberg "Store." Where you can just browse Gutenberg, find a book, and just grab it down to the reader. Instead, they either are actively hostile (Kindle), or require the use of Calibre (which itself is good, it is just the friction).

From Italy, https://www.gutenberg.org/ gives a 404 error and https://gutenberg.org/ opens a very official-looking page stating "police notice. This site is under judicial seizure" and references a sentence number: "criminal proceedings 52127/20 R.N.R.I. tribunal of Rome"

Any idea what's happening? I thought PG published public domain books...

Nice to see so much appreciation for what we do. (I'm the new-ish executive director.) Any wikipedians reading this, the article about PG is... aging. Last I looked, it said we offered Plucker files. @Jseiko has done some nice work.

Looks like the top downloaded book yesterday[0] was Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs by Gillette and Hill.[1] Beat out Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstien, Romeo and Juliet, and others.

> 23644 downloads in the last 30 days.

I wonder if this is bot behavior? 23k downloads feels like a lot?

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24855

Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove, though many technical details defy automatic typesetting of its books. Standard Ebooks takes consistency to an unbelievable level. My post compares various sources of public domain books with an eye on typesetting:

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

Worth mentioning the Project Gutenberg ZIMs. You can download the entire ENglish Gutenberg corpus for about 60GB (English Wikipedia ZIM complete with images is ~120GB):

https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html

Gutenberg is awesome. There is also

https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think

https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden

The project was geo-blocked in Germany for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024039

PG is proof that the best things on the internet are still built by people who just care about the mission.

I remember printing out project Gutenberg books in the mid-90s, four regular pages to an A4 page, double-sided on my inkjet. I had a background in typography, so I made it work.

Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right.

Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now.

Thanks for sticking with the project!

Project Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off. (And it has been over a decade I'm sure since I explored the site—so I am no doubt now misinformed.)

I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.)

I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference.

My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" with the fantastic art of John Tenniel and Carroll's sometimes creative formatting of the prose…

I see they (Project Gutenberg) have ePub now, which can be good if well done.

(If not well done it can be a kind of mess. Re-flowable "HTML", paginated… Anyone ever try to print a long web page and did you enjoy the result? Perhaps that is as much on the ePub reader though.)

Deeply grateful for Project Gutenberg & LibriVox! I've been using the text to force-align LibriVox recordings to produce word-by-word synced audiobooks; first stage of this project is a YouTube channel but I could definitely turn this into a mobile reader app if there's interest: https://www.youtube.com/@LitReadsEditions

Not sure if this is the right place, but the new layout of the German Projekt Gutenberg is missing any download links. For example

https://projekt-gutenberg.org/authors/johann-wolfgang-von-go...

Project Gutenberg feels like the opposite of modern internet design philosophy. Quiet, useful, accessible, and built to last.

As a Kindle user, I still miss the old version of the site. The new one looks great on normal desktop, but the old one was simple enough to load and directly download books on the device's built-in browser.

A big pet peeve of mine with Project Gutenberg was the lack of mobile styling. Looks like it’s been fixed! Awesome.

Made an app that allows reading PG books as audiobooks on iPhone https://loudreader.io/

Recently downloaded Moby Dick from here:) very easy to use

I'm slightly curious how PG handles heavily illustrated books. I've downloaded some years ago, and the quality of the illustrations was always pretty poor. Has it been improved lately? What's the QA like for illustrations?

I love how usable the site is even with JS disabled!

one of the last good websites on the web...

Is Project Guternberg ever going to add PDF download options?

Needs "translate" buttons. Now little too cumbersome for most,

https://www-gutenberg-org.translate.goog/cache/epub/64099/pg...

I thought this was for the Wordpress Gutenberg Editor for a second

Project Gutenberg is the best. Kudos to the team and to the 1000s years of humans developed it!

I love PG... but the covers stink. Should have a public competition to have new ones made and voted on. I'm willing to vibe code a website to make it happen if you're willing...

I wonder if the people behind project Gutenberg use Anna's Archive or mam for books that can't be put on Gutenberg.

my first ever coding project was making a chrome extension that made the typography better on the html formats: https://github.com/smcalilly/gutenberg-typography

Their feeds of new books is a goldmine:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/feeds.html

Every day you'll get much more than you're bargaining for, right into your feed or inbox. Easy download books you're interested in and put them on your Kindle.

I find it interesting that the context of this comments page apparently overrides the normal definition of “PG” on HN.

I wonder how extensive the overlap is with sacred-texts.com

PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.

Is there a plan to extend search to book content?

Text files are still the best

Good job

Project Guttenburg was my first introduction to the foss ethos. Well I suppose there was Wikipedia, but project Guttenburg really spoke to me. This was probably around 2003? So I'm glad to see it still going strong.

I just looked at the history (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60600/pg60600-images.ht...) and it dates back to the 70s. There was me thinking it was some new fangled web thing.

Please give me some book recommendations :)

I keep getting PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR

Keep up the awesome work !

All the books should be there. I understand that current society has restrictions, what with near infinite copyright and other shenanigans - but I don't see any of these as reason to hide information from mankind. Eventually we'll free all the information. Remuneration will have to occur in other ways than the current status quo.

Thank you for reminding me about this project. Didn’t visit it in a long time.

I love Project Gutenberg, don't get me wrong... but frankly, Anna's is better.

How did "Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs" come to be the #1 download?

Awesome

If you like Project Gutenberg, the closest analog for music is IMSLP, the Petrucci Music Library (imslp.org) — over 855,000 public-domain scores maintained by volunteers, with the same labor-of-love energy and the same perpetual scan-quality and copyright-jurisdiction headaches. Same ethos of "the works belong to humanity, not a storefront." Worth a bookmark for the musicians on HN.

I can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI